Power analysis attack resilient block cipher implementation based on 1-of-4 data encoding

Side-channel attacks pose an inevitable challenge to the implementation of cryptographic algorithms, and it is important to mitigate them. This work identifies a novel data encoding technique based on 1-of-4 codes to resist differential power analysis attacks, which is the most investigated category of side-channel attacks. The four code words of the 1-of-4 codes, namely (0001, 0010, 1000, and 0100), are split into two sets: set-0 and set-1. Using a select signal, the data processed in hardware is switched between the two encoding sets alternately such that the Hamming weight and Hamming distance are equalized. As a case study, the proposed technique is validated for the NIST standard AES-128 cipher. The proposed technique resists differential power analysis performed using statistical methods, namely correlation, mutual information, difference of means, and Welch's t-test based on the Hamming weight and distance models. The experimental results show that the proposed countermeasure has an area overhead of 2.3× with no performance degradation comparatively.